Why Was Pacific Northwest Home to So Many Serial Killers?
Fraser has been thinking about these ideas for decades. Before Prairie Fires was published, she had already written some of the memoir portions of the book, recalling the crimes and unusual occurrences near her family’s home. She was long interested in why there were so many serial killers in the Pacific Northwest and whether the answer was simply happenstance.
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“I did not conceive of it as a work of criminology or an academic treatise on the lead-crime hypothesis. I really just wanted to tell a history about the history of the area — what I remember of it — and create a narrative that took all these things into account.”
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Though she had some knowledge of the pollution in Tacoma as a kid — the area’s smell was referred to as the “Aroma of Tacoma” due to sulfur emissions from a local factory — it wasn’t until decades later that she learned the full scope of industrial production and pollution.
Some revelations came by chance. When looking at one property on Vashon Island, across the Puget Sound from West Seattle, she came across a listing with the ominous warning — “arsenic remediation needed.”
“That just leapt out at me,” she said. “How can there be arsenic on Vashon Island?” After more research, she discovered that arsenic had come from the ASARCO smelter, on the south end of the same body of water. The damage reached much farther; the Washington State Department of Ecology says that air pollutants — mostly arsenic and lead — from the smelter settled on the surface soil of more than 1,000 square miles of the Puget Sound Basin.
“Much of Tacoma, with a population approaching 150,000, will record high lead levels in neighborhood soils,” Fraser wrote in the book, “but the Bundy family lives near a string of astonishingly high measurements of 280, 340, and 620 parts per million.”
The connection made Fraser focus more on the physical environment in which these serial killers lived and less on other factors — like a history of abuse — on which true-crime writers have historically placed greater emphasis.
In this ecological pursuit, Fraser points readers toward once-ubiquitous sources of pollution like leaded gas and the industry forces that popularized them against advice from public-health experts.
American physicians raise concerns that lead particulates will blanket the nation’s roads and highways, poisoning neighborhoods slowly and “insidiously.” They call it “the greatest single question in the field of public health that has ever faced the American public.” Their concerns are swept aside, however, and Frank Howard, a vice president of the Ethyl Corporation, a joint venture between General Motors and Standard Oil, calls leaded gasoline a “gift of God.”
Though Fraser doesn’t explicitly support the lead-crime hypothesis, the core of the idea — that greater exposure to lead results in higher rates of crime — remains central. In the book’s final chapter, Fraser cites the work of economist Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, Harvard Ph.D. ’02, who concluded in her dissertation that lead exposure correlates with higher adult crime rates.
Regardless of exactly how much this hypothesis can be assuredly proven, Fraser thinks the connections between unapologetic and unfettered pollution and violent crime warrant scrutiny. In Murderland, she gives the idea, and an era of crime, a nimble, haunting narrative.
Jacob Sweet is a Harvard staff write. This article is published courtesy of the Harvard Gazette, Harvard University’s official newspaper.
